The Obsessive Diary

The thing about carnival is it begins long before it begins. And I’m talking for us, the receivers, the partiers and dance-abouters not the givers, the great families of carnival, the community leaders and organisers whose floats and costumes and pans and rehearsals have been at it for months in advance. But for me, who only sees the result, it started with council signs going up that parking is suspended.

Then the boards go up on shops and across stucco fronts; the tourists and influencers who come for the bookshop and blue door and ice cream coloured houses melt away before plywood spray-painted and tagged. Cafés close and our usual Friday market coffee is moved to Golbourne where we talk about our plans, will we be going in, which walkways are closed and when to get a wrist band for the Tabernacle. There is excitement in the air. And rain.

On Friday night there’s a Pans rehearsal on All Saints, mesmerising and rich; they’re so fast, how do they know, who are they watching to conduct them. Sixty or more and bodies jumping and music singing out, a handsome man, his arm around a pole, central to their throng, sticks in his hand has all their eyes upon him. I bump into A and L and others, it’s amazing and yet not at all that when you let go and move with the river, you find friends. The crowd packed tight and happy, jerk chicken barbecues throw smoke, backs flatten against walls to let others pass and we move sideways, smiling. A downpour stops the music and we wait and they wait and when pans are dried, up it starts again, this music central to Caribbean festival. This is a gathering of celebration begun to bring people together in the face of racial murder and division. It is second in size only to Rio. It is magnificent. And that was Friday. It hasn’t even begun yet it’s begun.

“If there weren’t race riots in Notting Hill I don’t believe that we would have had the Notting Hill Carnival. If it wasn’t for the murder of Kelso Cochrane, Carnival wouldn’t have happened.”The late Political Activist and Broadcaster, Darcus Howe

It’s Sunday and I woke as usual to work but the flat is filled with the sleeping bodies of J and his friends who all gathered here last night, and I am moved to a wobbly table in my bedroom with the window open and outside, moving with anticipation, groups of young people, bonnets and black leotards, head on up to where they will dress and climb and be the show for the children’s parade today. The street is free of cars, only Ladbroke Grove swishes with tyres. A police van is parked outside my door, also in anticipation, and the casual racism and unconscious racism and everyday conscious racism which walks these British streets is on show, too, in passing comments about being careful, in the assumption that trouble will come because this is a Black celebration, a Caribbean party; outside of West London white people nervousness is just as much on show.

“We felt that although West Indians, Africans, Irish and many others nationalities all live in a very congested area, there is very little communication between us. If we can infect them with a desire to participate, then this can only have good results.” Rhaune Laslett

I’ve just been out - a walkabout as it builds and Ladbroke Grove is a wild sea of paint and whistles and last night’s party running into today. Bodies prepared in plastic are rainbow spattered with the shower of colours from bottles sprayed into the air. There are girls doubled up in laughter and wide lines of friends in horned helmets, a post apocalyptic head gear of goggles and wide strides. There are bikinis and g-strings and heavy boots and horns blowing. Boys caped in flags, arms linked owning the street and sky.

And from my window:

It is glorious, and this is only the beginning. Sunday and not yet 10am. I’m going out again soon to get a wristband for The Tabernacle so I can come and go as I like, dive in and out as is my preferred way of being, moving alone so there’s no one to lose and nothing to chase or wait for.

More later…

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Each morning I wake at 5:03am. If my brain knows why it’s not telling. 5:03am and the dread of what’s the point yet I must because what else is there when you’re this deep in? I can’t go back. I am more than a year and 44,000 words lost in the forest of this book. It is dark. I can’t see my way except this one directive, to get up each morning and meet it at my desk, at my fingertips, as the sky turns pink and parrots escaped from cages settle in the trees. I wish I could say more about it. I wish I could talk about her but I fear this would ruin what already feels broken. I fear that would be the end of something that began as all novels begin, with the seed of an idea containing multitudes. I am disappearing. I am growing more silent by the day.

So I’ll write of other things, how I tried to cross London to meet WS for a long planned afternoon at V&A east, and how the gods disavowed it; South Kensington, shut. Sloane Square, shut. The tubes District and Central disrupted by minor works and major tragedies and nothing running to Stratford that would get me there on time. I hate letting friends down.

How J and T went out last night in war paint made from my eyeliner to dance up the dawn somewhere far south. I heard T knocking about as I woke and J fell in the door, just as I finished work; covered in dust and laughing, how I gave him water and put him to bed in my room. I’m on the train now, a Sunday emptiness and I’ve stolen a first class seat because no other carriage has a table.

I could write about how the weather cooled this week and I heard a friend who’d been at a festival - predominantly white, predominantly with feathers in their hair - argue the heating of the planet was nothing to do with us while in the same breath that “they” control the weather.

But I feel spectacularly separate. As if all the talking is done.

Eleanor

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He said he wasn’t very good and he’d filled in the crease where his nose met his cheek with the felt tip pen he was using to annotate his sheet music but this kid could play. St Pancras International. A humid Saturday. Arrivals dotted with the peculiar mix of expectation and love that marks it out as my favourite theatre. The train from Paris delayed. A piano and a boy. It took me three goes to find his parent. First I asked the fella nearby who’d been smiling possessively. He’s with us I thought his curls and hat said, the lilt of his hips. But when I asked he was non-plussed with a French accent even while a woman near by agreed, you have to get permission. Some pointing, a mother eating a soft baguette sandwich in the enclave of the Arrivals doors, the doors still shut, beside a father, tall and bellied and a smaller child; all this my supposition as I made my request, would it be okay to take his picture? They looked at me blankly. A chorus from the crowd, No, her; she who sat alone on a chair pulled from a cafe, also in the uncrowded enclave that soon would stream with Eurostar passengers fresh off the morning train from Gare du Nord. And still the boy played.

His mother said I’d have to ask him, and if he was okay with it, so was she which was exactly what I’d expect from a childrearing that produced a boy in a train station playing like a champ with his sheet music annotated and felt tip in the crevice of his nose.

I’m not very good

Yes you are and it’s photo not a film, no sound.

The woman who’d agreed permission was needed smiled and I smiled back.

All this as I waited for the doors to open, the 13:30 from Paris delayed but only by minutes. Not hours or months, not since April when my own boy who is not mine, who is his own man but made of my flesh, left on his adventures. I hadn’t said I’d be there but he’d texted a screen grab of his ticket and even though the last four months have brought the argument of individuation to my 3am door, the worry of not knowing after 19 years of knowing most things about him relegated to the bucket of deal with it, you have to deal with it I reckoned the little boy in him would be pleased. Mamma. This dance of letting go and getting on with our own lives is a sheet music annotated in felt tips. Trust them, but never forget I’m your mother. You’re an adult now but remember I have feelings. Checking in isn’t smothering it’s love. We’ll have to disagree on that last point. In an almost identical conversation with B on the phone yesterday, in Ireland wandering free, I don’t want to have to be thinking about telling you where I am. There is beauty in this and there is pain. There is trust and there is fear which cold sweats 3am into sleepless dawn. There is the inevitability of this hour in our lives. This is exactly as it’s supposed to be.

And when the doors open, the soft baguette-eating family moved aside or be drowned in the river of expectant faces, tired bags, and hugs, there is my own. I knew you’d be here to which I replied, I couldn’t help it.

Eleanor

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I’ve come down to the farm for a few days. The silence is sweet music. When I arrived on Thursday afternoon I stopped on the stairs, listening. Nothing. No sirens wailing. No speeding BMWs down Ladbroke Grove. No warning of lorries reversing or sigh of the number 52 outside my door. No shouts. Five months into London life and my nervous system acclimatises to the insistence of noise with energetic certainty; I sleep through it, mostly, but paused mid-step on the stairs at the farm, black and white photographs lining the walls of childhood summers, my children growing frame by frame, every antennae in my blood stream takes a breath and waits and breathes out.

I am experiencing the farm now how others have experienced it for the last thirty years; as respite, as healing, as nurture. The cats curl about me and I remember how much I miss them. My horse shakes his head and bumps his shoulder against mine and I remember how much I love him. The trees wave, the house ticks, the ants go about their business in the sink and I notice changes. The Oak in the bottom field has dropped another giant limb to the parched ground, a balancing which speaks of drought and intelligence. The Vine over the pergola is rooting into the terrace. The sapling Gingko is almost dying but not quite and I turn on the hose and leave it running, water taken direct from the ancient well. The Willow says everything’s fine but the grassland is fit for fire. The wall behind the kitchen door is crumbling.

And I keep up the relentless effort that is writing a new book - once in I cannot stop - it is every morning five till seven or whatever two hours are present; in London it was inching backwards to four-thirty but here, with sleep deeper, it slumbers forward again. Two hours no matter what, and the most productive are often the ones I’m least enthusiastic about meeting. This morning I tried very hard with it’s Sunday but the writer in me wasn’t having it and somehow, as with a therapy appointment when you think you’ve got nothing to say, into that unmanaged space came words unpredicted. They are often the best.

It is slow, this novel-writing business. I think of Zadie Smith describing it like a bear hunt. Into the woods I go leaving civilisation far behind. I may come back with something. I may come back with nothing. I may not come back at all.

I’ve watered the Cacti family in the kitchen and moved the Money plant to the sitting room window where my lovely neighbour who feeds the cats won’t forget it. I’ve scattered black gold from Poppy heads into grassland for next year’s glory. I’ve watered the Cherries moved recently from pots and also my neighbour’s new hedge and also the Olive which is happy now, dancing outside the Granary. And the silence brings space to my limbs, and the quiet rushes my ears and leavens my brain, and my muscles subside into butter. I am here and deep in a novel. I wish it would rain.

Eleanor

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* I will never belong (in my family). I will always be shut out and rejected.

I’ve been listening to Tara Brach (god I love her) and thinking about the stories we tell and the importance of saying them out loud.

A few weeks ago I used the L word (loser) and a beautiful wave of friends broke on my shore in all the ways that speak of love as well as an excellent telling off by MH which, were it not private, I would share in a heartbeat because it was so brilliantly eloquent and strict and also full of love and I’m not having that plus Pull Yourself Together. And correct. I am not and she was right. Everyone needs at least one crack on to yourself friend and I have a handful (yes, AW I’m looking at you, too).

But the point I want to make is this: when a person is able to name a thing that’s buried deep in the shame closet, the thing loses its power. Up until that moment I’d never in my adult life used that word against me; I’ve plenty of other violences to set upon myself and that particular one was not a well used weapon but you can bet on all the home cooking in the history of humanity that somewhere in my childhood I had thought it, and felt it, and believed it to be absolutely true. Having caught it by the throat in the moment it resurfaced fifty years later, shone a light on it and said its name out loud it has withered in my hand and turned to dust.

So here’s another story I tell.

* I will never belong (in my family). I will always be shut out and rejected.

Don’t panic. I know it’s a story. As Tara Brach says, real, but not true and what’s interesting is how I’ve transcribed it onto my career. When I illustrate the story I see a child jumping at high, locked gates and when I enter sensation I feel a desperate, clawing, strangulating need. I hear tears and on turning up the volume, please, please, please let me in. Let’s pull focus. There, the high walls, there the impenetrable castle with the figure minuscule against it. There the impossibility of belonging and the expressionless face of stone walls that say they do not care.

How I arrived at this story is for another time, I can say with confidence that it was never the fault of my siblings. What matters, if I want to change it, is how its unspoken veracity has made itself real in my adult life. I used to wear it with a f**k-you pride but that doesn’t serve either because it’s a reaction to a corrupt premise. Engaging with stories strengthens their existence. Ask any writer. So instead I’m engaging the Tara Brach method of naming it. I have a story that I will never belong. There. I’ve said it. I’ve caught it by the neck, held it up to the light and said its name out loud. Let’s watch it turn to dust in my hands.

Eleanor

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So the story goes I danced on his feet. Did I? There comes a point in childhood tales when fact and fiction merge. They are flash cards; nothing before, nothing after. I remember a room full of adults, I remember light brown brogues, the pattern of indentations, an invitation to stand on them, his hands held out to me. I remember being lifted into a waltz. Did I know it was David Bowie? Of course not. I was a child. His name, who he was, would have meant nothing to me. I was over at my friend’s house whose parents knew everyone, it wasn’t uncommon to meet Shirley McLaine on the stairs. But is it true that the God Himself took me in his arms and for moments which last forever we were connected? I’m going to have to do some fact-checking. M, if you’re reading this, call me.

While we’re waiting, let’s go to The Lightroom in Kings Cross, an area transformed out of all recognition where other flashcards present memories of squats and raves and cars slowing down in the early hours along roads with no pavements, sex workers leaning, a privacy and abandonment in central London, all ours, no one wanted it, not then. Built for the Great Northern Railway, coal delivered along the canal and shunted into engines screaming north, these vast brick warehouses had fallen into emptiness and rats. Keep Out. But we didn’t. There’s some great footage by Annie Macmanus in Who Killed The Night? of the area as the developers moved in, the death of the scene that filled nineties, clubs and parties shunted out for what we have now. Go there. Tell me what you think.

It is clean brick and sober. It is huge friendly arrows encouraging to me to Explore this way! Bars and restaurants in ordered ranks, the stench and smear of coal and choking coke replaced by clean clothes in windows. A small cinema screen set in a huge box on the edge of the canal is watched by lazing eyes leant on over-sized pillows scattered colourfully on double-height steps as if all of it was made for giants. Rows of ground level fountains spray fresh water to the delight of toddlers in waterproof nappies. There is Courtyard Eating and Fashion.

The Lightroom declares, David Bowie: You’re Not Alone, but set within this newly crowded, socially cohesive, shopping-entertainment Mecca that by all measure of commercial data has improved an area from “no use” to “use” the singularity of Bowie stands out. It feels to me the thing which he brought continues to reckon him very much alone indeed.

“If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

David Bowie

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He came to the door looking for the key to the electrics box. Actually I heard the ship’s bell clang on the gate and looked out through michaelmas daisies to see legs and a body moving through long grass so I went to the front door and waited. He was slight. Short hair gathered in a knot on the top of his head. I’ve been through this before with the key and I said so, inviting him in to search the rows of old and new collected on the dresser hooks. Maybe this one. Or this one. Next we searched the neighbour’s cupboards and shelves, places where it might be hung; friends who wouldn’t mind, who left their door open, whose electrics he was fixing. It was retracing our steps across my overgrown yard that the conversation began.

Who lives there? He pointed at the cabin.

And I told him a bit about B.

My son’s autistic, too. His mother left.

And out it came in the kitchen. How she’d planned it, asking him to take two days off work, fabricating a doctor's appointment, sending a text after a twenty-four hour silence, typing I can’t do this anymore.

He was five. He keeps asking “why can’t I speak to her” and I say “I don’t know where she is, baby.”

A glass of water. More.

I’m from Rwanda. I witnessed the genocide. I came here when I was nine. No child should have to see these things.

Standing in the kitchen.

I’ll never understand how you can kill for something. It’s such a small thing, empathy, but it’s missing.

Eyes direct.

She took his older brother but not him.

We were sitting by now at the table. I recalled the others I knew whose mothers left them, walked out taking some and leaving others, stumbling over they never recovered with the codicil of difference; the fathers left to care for them never talked about it.

Slight body, hair gathered in a plait, looking at his phone as we tried to figure out the key problem and the empathy problem and the how does a person be so present with all this contained within them? In France I had a row with AS about human leanings - she of the view that without work we slide into nothing while I banged the drum for the equally natural state of brilliance which doesn’t get half the attention it deserves; there’s no workshop for everyday kindness, human wisdom, a reconciliation of witness into love not hate. He and I at my kitchen table, two expressions of the same source come to the same conclusion from wildly brutal different paths. A moment in time before we diverged again in body only. When I experience it in another, this ability to ingest and recover enough to walk away through the michaelmas daisies, to witness and conclude love, to carry on caring despite the slamming I know we humans have magnificence.

Acts like this will never make the news but they’re happening all the time.

Eleanor

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I can’t read anything since.

My eye slips over other people’s words like butter, as if they are coated, I cannot stick.

It is a double spiral: no matter where you start, as long as you circle to the same place it will make sense. I understand the structure, but not how to do it. The God of Small Things has changed me.

Later the same day…

It’s taken three days for us to settle, but now we are one amorphous animal moving past each other, limbs of the same beast. We have collected and coalesced. Jokes are appearing like ribs, a funny bone repeated, making sense. We have found our common language and our parts. Our eyes look out from each other’s heads. Nick-names appear. Songs worm through the kitchen and emerge as shorthand in the car. Conversations begin in the dining room and conclude hours later on the swing chair. We swim, come up for air, lounge and sweat. Today we went to the market. AS picked up a crumpled green denim to reveal a zippered jumpsuit made for me. The guy wanted €20 - had I heard that right? A few stalls down and they’re €80, but no. Funny Italian man speaking French like a Florentine repeats vingt. Okay. Deal done.

And I must learn to live with fire, the ever-present threat. On Friday I met with the farmer who talked of it, pointing out the slice of underbrush we must take on to avoid producing a highway for l’incendie; the cut is late this year because I arrived early. The waving mess of brown which once was green grass, soft and beautiful in May speaks, only now of kindling. It will take them a week to clear it all. It is another step toward prevention, a limiting of damage.

Limiting is all we can do. Fire will return as the woman who sells ancient linen said today when I stopped to say hello and run my hands over those undyed fabrics, thick with weave and marked by initials hard to read. It’s only a matter of time. And so through all my prayer and night terror and day terror and pleading I conclude I must learn to live with fire. She will come. We will be as ready as we can be.

The house asks me, Can you love without fear? I have been practicing.

Five days later….

H and J have gone, they left on Wednesday, J to Marseille and H to Nice. On Monday we took them to the funfair where their eyes were shot into the back of their heads and their stomachs into their mouths by ejector seats and triple bunjis and cartwheels that made me sick to look at. None of them could sleep that night. While they were being tossed into the air, S, A and me sat on a wall in Port Grimaud. The evening strolled by in all its little theatre. Two girls in matching frilly shorts and crop-tops, flesh competing with a stark pattern of cartoons in squares as if we could stop and read them. A tall and curving sulk in bright green skirt, afraid of her height took a photograph of her smiling friend. An exquisitely beautiful family of tiny afro-haired children corralled by a mother and father asked us to capture them on the bridge, her phone handed over. In cafés the football played loud.

S, A & J went to Marseille last night for the jazz festival and to be amongst the bars where Morocco would lose to France. B and me stayed home for quiet conversation in the courtyard. We explained things to each other. This time with them has been precious. There is better understanding of this process, child to adult, the changing nature of relationship, how to bridge. How not to find oneself living in a soap opera drama, triangulated, strangulated by cliché casting. This is what Arundhati Roy got so right, the maturity of The God of Small Things being in the structure of double spiral, everything moving toward or away endlessly on the pattern of relational geometry. Curves upon straight lines like the stooping girl on the bridge, human nature swirling inward, repelling outward like the funfair ride that flew them horizontal in the air. Against the strictures of cultural scaffold the river eddies, upon the bridge the girl stoops, along the rails the rollercoaster cars turn screams upside down and we bend towards and away from each other. I felt relieved when I read The God of Small Things. I felt allowed. This is real life.

There is something else I've understood here: it’s to do with want and ambition and I’ll never. It’s to do with known and success and my parents masquerading as achievements. A and I discussed it while walking a dappled pavement. This’ll show ‘em and now they’ll… - the headlines as we win imaginary things. So deep the carving in our psyches there’s not much more we can do but recognise. But in that recognition something has left me. There are more brilliant, award winning, talented writers out there that I’ll never know than ones I will know of. I realise that’s a stumbling sentence but also, for me, profound.

Eleanor

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